Just like some consumers might double their monthly coffee bills to participate in the cosmopolitan romance of the Starbucks brand or others might wrap their social identities around the Harley-Davidson brand, Trump’s appeal had less to do with his resume and more to do with the stories his supporters were able to plug into. The power of charisma simply overwhelmed the facts. Like a punchline-worthy used car salesman, Trump had a bridge to sell us—himself.[1] While he might have boasted of having “big words,” Trump actually understands quite well that the semiotic power of his personal brand of magic depends bigly on his flaunting the social conventions of the people he effectively marginalizes as ‘liberal elites.’ He and his counselors know that Trumpism depends on, as Judith Butler explains, the mining and psychic liberation of our collective Id. The more technocratic and peppered with the professional language of officialdom the Clinton message became, the bigger Trump’s appeal among his supporters became. The election became an MMA grappling contest halfway through. And, in the end, magic trumped ‘rational’ debate, exploiting its narrative, bodily and psychic weaknesses by consistently shifting the terrain and rules of combat to favor ‘spiritualized’ and half-conscious (if that) longings for racial superiority, the dividends of patriarchal prerogatives, and capitalist success.

I recently attended a performance in Brooklyn of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. The ritual—a kind of performance of secular church—was replete with song, costume and fiery oratory. In one of the homilies, a meditation on earth justice, the good preacher implored us to be in air….to be the air. I thought about a conversation I had with my students about Native American lifeways and the Hopi people, in particular, for whom the rain clouds are the ancestors. What a difference it would make if we understood the natural world as ancestors to whom we have special obligations and responsibilities rather than inert crude resources from which profit might be excised!

[2] Indeed, consumer markets in journalism being what they are, the same company might pitch and sell both ‘left’ and ‘right’ outrage via different URLs. The brand form can sometimes harbor competing ideological sympathies at once.

George González is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Monmouth University. His research interests lay in the sociocultural legislation of Western metaphysics and the concrete and specific form of power that has attached to liberalism, as a historically specific kind of cosmology. He remains especially interested in approaching the study and criticism of postsecular, neoliberalism through the framework of religious social change. He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital—Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Projectand is currently working on a multi-site ethnography and historiography of the ritualization of consumer capitalism and is set to begin fieldwork with the famed radical performance troupe, Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping in early 2017.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.